Homecomings, 1945

I think these will be the last of the pictures from Belleville for a while.

Now I do have more from the collection of Mike Dufresne but these two perfectly tell the story of the return of the Hastings and Prince Edward  Regiment from its war in Europe.

The regiment left Canada for Britain soon after the war began and saw action in France, Italy and Holland and returned to Belleville Ontario in the autumn of 1945.

I have featured five of the photographs from the collection and each has its own story or perhaps stories, and while there are more pictures I think these pretty much make closure. 

And like all good photographs after you have taken in the image with these two you wonder what else there is.  Now if truth were known I don’t have a clue what else lies hidden.

For a start I don’t know who any of the people are and nor do I know what happened to them so we are left with just asking questions.

Of the four men one is in civilian clothes and yet he appears to share a bond with the other three.  

So are they comrades, and was he invalided out due to an injury?  

Which begs the question of whether the tiny lapel badge is significant?

The military ribbons on the other three testify to the action they have seen but all that is now in the past, and with all the fuss and noise of a homecoming with the town turned out to meet the regiment these four have sought each other out. 

I would like to know what interests them so much about the flag and the detail one of the soldiers is pointing to and for that matter what is being said.

Perhaps it is just a posed shot but there is something in the gaze of one of the four which leads me to think it is more than just a rehearsed photograph.

In the same way I am drawn to the other picture.  The couple stare in a relaxed way at the camera while around them men disembark from the train.

They seem perfectly at ease on that railway station and what I like about the picture is that you have a sense they have been caught in mid motion stopping just for a minue at the request of the photographer.  

And if it does not seem fanciful you half expect them to move off , thanking the photographer and mumbling something about having somehere to go.

There is much more that I could say about these two but none of it would be based on historical research, so I shall just leave them to their reunion on a pleasant sunny day sometime in 1945.

Pictures; courtesy of Mike Dufresne

Wishing you were here.......Eltham in the past, Nu 1 walking up to Shooters Hill in 1873

An occasional series which is short on words and just lets your imagination roam.

This is a section of the OS map for Kent First Edition, 1858-73.

If like me you enjoy looking at maps and plotting journeys, I leave you with it.

Picture; detail from the OS map of Kent 1858-73, sheet 02

"The growth of antisemitism, the rise of economic nationalism" ………. from the perspective of 1938

I have come back to a book I first read over thirty years ago, and it seems as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1938.

It was written by Louis Golding, who was a very successful novelist as well as literary critic, essayist and film script writer.

He was born in Manchester in1895 to a Ukrainian-Jewish family, described his politics as “strongly to the left” and in 1938 wrote The Jewish Problem which was published as a Penguin Special.

The book examines the history of antisemitism, and Zionism, against the backdrop of “The Nazi Horror” and concludes with a final chapter on  “The Future”.

Reading that last chapter, written in 1938, before the outbreak of the last world war, and the Holocaust is not easy reading.

"A JEW cannot be blamed if, as he considers the present condition of his people, his heart is filled with despair. German Jewry, one of the oldest and most solidly established in Europe has been completely overwhelmed.  Another great Jewry has followed that of Germany into the chasm, within the past few months, with catastrophic suddenness; Jewry strains its eyes, in an agony of apprehension, to know who goes next.

The great Jewish masses of eastern Europe, above all, are in peril.  Today the doom involves more than half a million souls.  What if tomorrow it should involve five millions?  The prospect is too mournful to contemplate, but it is so far from remote that it must be contemplated.
The growth of anti-Semitism, the rise of economic nationalism, and the dark shadow of unemployment have made it increasingly difficult for even refugees from central Europe to find  a haven elsewhere.”*

There will be some who dismiss re reading the book, given that we know what happened, but that is the point, knowing what happened makes reading the book all the more relevant.

And that of course is set against the rising tide of antisemitism, the small but none the less active group of Holocaust deniers, and that bunch that set out to argue that the present wave of antisemitic attacks with reference to Israel, which of course by extension falls into that obscene logic of blaming antisemitism on the Jews.

So, having read this book I am also interested in Mr. Golding, and have on order, Magnolia Street, written in 1933, and set in the High Town area of Manchester a decade earlier.  It too is a book I read along time ago and while I am at it, I will also look out his films.

Picture; the cover of The Jewish Problem 

* The Jewish Problem, Louis Golding, November 1938, reprinted, November 1938, and January 1939

Derrick Lea ….. the man who drew Manchester

Today I have been reunited with Mr. Derrek Lea who drew Manchester in the 1950s and 60s.

St. Ann's Square, Manchester, circa 1950s-60s

His images include many of our iconic buildings as well as Chorlton where he lived and out into the leafy suburbs.

Piccadilly, Manchester, circa 1950s-60s

His work is instantly recognisable and crops up across social media, and yet most of his pictures are not attributed, and that is a great shame.

I first came across a collection of his Chorlton and Didsbury scenes which had had been marketed as picture postcards, and a few more from a calendar and while Mr. Lea was credited I could find little about him.

From the style and the clothes and cars I guessed most were drawn into the 1950s and into the next decade, but apart from a reference in a directory to an address in Chorlton he remained an elusive fellow.

Not that it stopped me reproducing his pictures on the blog and while I credited him no one came forward to tell me more about this remarkable artist.

Until a few weeks ago when the wife of his son contacted me with "Hi Andrew - you have written a blog about my father-in-law … Derrick Lea.   His son has tried to contact you. I thought it was wonderful that someone had looked and researched the life of Derrick and I knew it would be amazing for you to actually meet Derrick's son".

Mr. Derrick Lea, undated

And it was, because Jon Lea not only filled me in on his dad’s life, but shared three albums of Derrick’s work.  They spanned his war time service with the RAF in Africa, his stay in various Manchester hospitals and of course those prints of the city.

Piccadilly, Manchester, circa 1960s

He was a prolific artist working in water colours, line drawings and prints which are accompanied with letters, official notes and his own observations and comments.

It was a smashing hour and half in which the conversation ranged over his dad’s early life, his work as a commercial artist and the question of how best to preserve the collection.

And Jon followed it up yesterday by sending over a wide selection of scanned copies of the pictures.

In return with Jon’s permission the images will be posted on the blog, and unlike some artists I have featured, Mr. Lea went out and drew and painted his pictures in situ which makes them a wonderful historic record and unique in that they are not based on photographs and so add to our knowledge.

John Rylands Library, Manchester, circa 1950s-60s

The difficulty then became what pictures to use for the first of the series.  I know I should have asked Jon and Hazel and for future stories I will approach them, but today I just chose four that resonate with me.

Leaving me just to thank Jon and Hazel for making the effort to contact me and then to share this wonderful collection.

Pictures; St Ann’s Square, Piccadilly and the John Rylands Library, circa 1950s-60

Next; Mr. Lea's life

Spots of Lights: Women in the Holocaust ...... an online exhibition ..... one to view

An important new exhition Spots of Light.*

"The Holocaust was a watershed event in human history – an act of murder and violence that the Nazis and their accomplices unleashed against the Jewish people. 

Death awaited all who professed the Jewish faith, and the path to this denouement was paved with ghastly violence. In certain respects, however, women, men, and children followed different paths to death.

 In this exhibition we attempt to reveal the human story that lurks behind the historical account of what happened. Within this story, we chose to tell about the Jewish victims and create space for the unique voice of the women among them".

*Spots of Light: Women in the Holocaust, https://wwv.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/women-in-the-holocaust/index.asp

**Yad Vashen News, https://trailer.web-view.net/Show/0X4E1D458259BD54E71004CF2497F58A57E931A597041167D73457FFF0FB57D3AAFC7B75182448CBB4.htm

Nightingale’s, and an old 78 RPM ............. a little bit of our retail past on Wilbraham Road

Now I wonder if anyone remembers Nightingales the electrical shop which traded from 436 Wilbraham Road.

Like most of the strip of shops along the stretch from Keppel to Albany no 436  is now a fast food out let but back in the middle decades of the last century Nightingale’s sold all things electrical and by 1960 had an impressive range of televisions, transistor radios, fridges and washing machines in its window.

Now I know it was there by 1938 and still there in 1960 by a chance find and three photographs from the Manchester Digital collection.

The chance find was an old 78 RPM record of the Boston Promenade Orchestra performing the Ritual Fire Dance and the Conclusion to Bolero conducted by Arthur Fiedler.

And the catalogue number dated the record to 1938 while the perfectly preserved dust cover offered up the Nightingale name and the address of both the Chorlton shop and another at 58 Wilmslow Road in Withington.

At which point I can claim little credit for the find or much of the subsequent research.

It was Andy Robertson’s son who came across the record and Andy who went looking in Manchester's  digital collection, leaving me the easy job of hunting down the record in the HMV catalogue.

In time I am sure there will be people who offer up all sorts of memories of the shop, what they bought there and perhaps a beginning and end date to the business.

For now I shall just reflect that it wasn’t too long ago that high streets and more humble parades of shops could boast a full range of shopping experiences from the wool shop, electrical business along with DIY, hardware and the odd travel agents.

So there you have it a bit of our consumer past on Wilbraham Road, with just one last observation that it had gone by 1969.

Additional research by Andy Robertson

Pictures; record and dustcover, circa 1938 from the collection of Andy Robertson and Nightingale’s on Wilbraham Road, 1960, A E Landers, m18308 & m18307, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Going to school in Eltham in 1840

Now the National School  was opened in 1814 by the Reverend J.K. Shaw Brooke.

These were church schools and provided elementary education for the children of the poor.

They were the product of the National Society which had begun in 1811 and aimed to establish a national school in every parish delivering a curriculum based on the teaching of the church.

According to a report of the Charity Commissioners from 1819 the annual salary of the school master was to be £20 and by one of those wonderful chance survivals the first register was preserved which the historian R.R.C.Gregory published in his of Eltham.*

“Amongst the “batch of boys admitted were many bearing names that are still familiar in Eltham,
James Shearing, aged 7
John Scriven, aged 11
Thomas Foster, aged 6
Edward Hand, aged 10, 
William Stevens, aged 6
Charles Russell, aged 9
James Kingston, aged 7
I. Wakeman, aged 6
T.Wakeman, aged 8.”

And just like these names were familiar to Mr Gregory and his readers in 1909, some have stepped out of the shadows again today.

Thomas Foster was the son of the blacksmith who helped run the smithy on the High Street and the Wakeman boys were I think related to Peter Wakeman who had been invited to the Jubilee celebrations to mark the Reverend J.K. Shaw Brooke’s fifty years as vicar of Eltham.

This first school was at the end of Pound Place where it joined Back Lane and 1840 the infants’ school was added.

Now given that I have already mentioned Richard White who taught at the school in 1841, and lived on Pound Place I reckon there are a few more stories to come on the National School, its teachers and students.

Location; Eltham, London



Pictures; The National Infants School 1909,  from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm